The importance o f creative thinking in science cannot be overstated. Creativity is
integral to the development of knowledge about the natural world and the knowledge,
skills and abilities that support it are in need o f greater understanding. The Next
Generation Science Standards (2012) include practices that implicitly emphasize the
creative thinking in science that students should develop by the 12th grade. These science
practices were utilized in a framework to explore a group of secondary science classrooms
in order to investigate potential relationships between classroom variables and student
creative thinking in science. A measure o f scientific creative thinking (Hu & Adey, 2002)
was used with 284 student participants from 21 different classes, six different schools and
from seven different teachers. Students’ performance on a pre to post-administration of
the measure was compared against case studies that were developed o f each classroom to
determine trends. Those case studies were developed across one semester using 2-3
observations per class per semester and the collection and analysis of teachers’ labs and
other instructional materials.
The outcomes o f a pre to post-administration o f the measure, when coupled with
the case studies, suggested three distinct trends in relationships between classroom
variables and students’ scientific creative thinking. These trends: originality in the use of
scientific tools, originality and variety in the development of scientific questions, and the
role o f context in the development of original, engineering-type design tasks are discussed